Nalates wrote:Finding some reasonable way to enforce rules and standards is a problem that extends beyond the Uru community. Other game communities are looking for solutions. An example is in an article titled: Pricing Games According to Player Behavior

The title says most of it. The surprising part is that Valve boss Gabe Newell is looking at adopting it for Valve.

Of course they are running a pay for play service and have enforcement leverage not available in MOULa and fan shards. But, this shows a trend to use ties to behavior to some enforcement/reward system. Problem players would be at a disadvantage and popular players would be rewarded.

As the author points out the big problems with such an idea are in deciding who's good and bad. Automated systems making the decision are consistently gamed. Santa is otherwise occupied and his elves are busy trying to unionize. A labor intense process is about all that is left.

Yes, I totally agree that enforcement on the MOULa shard will be difficult because of how it is owned & operated.

I do not know of and did not see enforcement as a problem for fan shards in the past, now or in the future.

Enforcement on the fan shards back in Until URU days was really quite good. There usually was someone with the authority online most of the time. Most fan shards were not wide open either. You usually had to go through the shard’s owner & operator to acquire login authentication through the shard's forum. One's every movements can be and will be monitored by one or more Shard Admins. Trust me on this one. Who is bad and who is good is up the fan shard owners & operators and the word on malcontents was and is past around at the speed of light. Just look at the number of shards (75+) there were during and after UU. Enforcement for fan shards was obviously not a problem.

Your experience with the UU shards is way deeper than mine, so maybe you can address this - were there any instances of a player's identity being stolen or spoofed back then? I hear so much about the lousy security of MOULa, but have no idea whether such a thing is possible. It's not a matter of fooling players (for example, creating an avatar named Zard0z), so it would take some serious work to succeed. Nevertheless, given some of the deep animosities that are now entrenched in the MOULa community, I wouldn't rule out such an event altogether but would put it as a very low probability (if it's even possible).

Sock puppeting is a well know art form in the MOUL community (remembering Starfrye) so yes, someone will probably try to borrow my pony too but then again someone is always trying to steal your pony on the Internet.

In the beginning there were and will be some issues which are to be expected. Yes there were a few vault wipes in the beginning also but the community learned very quickly how to protect itself. One example, backups of vault so you only lost a few days instead of everything with a complete wipe.

I don’t see it much different than letting someone into your RL home to play in your sandbox. You will be watched very closely by the owner & operators and the shard’s community. Most shards I would think will operate through a forum where some form of vetting (email, IP checks) will go on. I think the method-ology will vary from shard to shard depending on their theme so on and so forth so to speak.

I'm inclined to agree with semplerfi that "policing" fan shards will be less of an issue than it is in MOULa, simply because the administration will be different. Cyan do not have the resources to put in ResEngs as they did during Gametap, and don't even really have enough resource to do anything more than very superficial monitoring of the servers. Fan shards will be watched more closely by their admins, albeit probably nothing near 24/7 supervision, but they'll be smaller and more "personal", so the rotten apples will soon show.

In-game game masters or Res Eng equivalents can be appointed by the shard admin as they see fit. The idea of fan Res Engs for MOULa has been suggested a number of times and compared to appointing fans to help moderate the Cyan forums. But I don't see those roles as really similar: A moderator's task is slow-time (relatively) while a Res Eng job is real-time. If a moderator action looks to be wrong it can be undone, but you can't easily undo the damage/hurt caused if you erroneously eject someone from the game. I think it's that latter aspect that means that Cyan will only countenance accountable people (i.e. paid employees) to be Res Engs on their server. The idea of fan Res Engs was suggested to Cyan prior to MOULa's public opening and summarily rejected, I believe for that reason.

just like semplerfi i too think it may be a bit harder with the MOULa fan shard to deal with bad apples unlike in the UU day MOULa shard with have there own Auth unlike UU where Cyan ran the Auth Server. in the UU day a bad apple GUID was the same on all shards so it made it easy to banned them from the shard's as the info about there GUID would be shared with the shard owners. with MOULa fan shard a bad apple will have a different account name and GUID so yes i can banned them from my shard but there is nothing to pass on to other shard's owners other then what that user did.